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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26471836">The Monstrous Regiment of Women</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeagueOfWonder/pseuds/LeagueOfWonder'>LeagueOfWonder</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Romance, F/F, Female Draco Malfoy, Female Draco Malfoy/Female Harry Potter, Female Harry Potter, Happy Ending, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Post-Prison, Prison, Romance, Rule 63</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 09:13:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,814</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26471836</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeagueOfWonder/pseuds/LeagueOfWonder</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Three weeks into her imprisonment, Draco turns to the wall and whispers her name and a greeting. The building considers her for a moment. She lies still under the judgment, feeling herself being observed. The building scoffs at her and turns its attention to other things. She sighs and resigns herself to a lonely year.</p><p>It is a week later that the building asks her, hesitantly, what she did to end up in prison. Draco grins and, this time, she is the one to turn away.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Monstrous Regiment of Women</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It is a Thursday in July when Draco is escorted into her prison cell. She is holding her arm gingerly against her chest, still able to feel each line of the blue numbers they had permanently etched into her skin just fifteen minutes before.</p><p>She waits for the door to bang shut before lifting her sleeve experimentally, examining the redness and hastily inked numbers. She brushes her index finger over each number individually, memorizing them—583827. She is 583827. Draco shudders.</p><p>After a long moment, she makes her way over to the bed in the corner of the room, examines it critically. Metal frame, drilled into the floor. Thin mattress. Threadbare sheets with a dull wool blanket on top. She lays down, lets her eyes drift up to the ceiling and stares blankly above until she falls asleep.</p><p>*</p><p>Three weeks into her imprisonment, Draco turns to the wall and whispers her name and a greeting. The building considers her for a moment. She lies still under the judgment, feeling herself being observed. The building scoffs at her and turns its attention to other things. She sighs and resigns herself to a lonely year.</p><p>It is a week later that the building asks her, hesitantly, what she did to end up in prison. Draco grins and, this time, she is the one to turn away.</p><p>Draco settles into a routine. She gets two letters every week. They are handwritten in beautiful cursive stretching over the page. She reads them, savoring each anecdote and silly joke. She presses her face against the paper and breathes in the smell. She stows each letter in a growing stack under her bed. In the mornings, when she feels able to get up out of bed, she will reach down and pull out the stack, scattering them over her bed. She likes to close her eyes and pick a letter at random, re-reading the descriptions of mundane university parties and long, flowing paragraphs about nature and the feel of the sun. Draco thanks God her sister studies English.</p><p>She gets an hour, five days a week, to leave her cell. Head to the library. Take a shower. In the first few weeks, when she still feels human, she spends every minute of that hour outside the cell. The exercise yard is a square stretch of dirt populated by somewhere between twenty and fifty prisoners at any given moment. She goes outside and just stands in the sun, listening to it sing to her. Occasionally, a prisoner will approach her, try to start a conversation. Sometimes, they ask her if she’s ready for a go in the showers. Sometimes, they ask her name and hobbies. She doesn’t bother to answer either and they usually go away eventually, grumbling about bitches who think they’re better than everyone else.</p><p>As time passes, she spends most of her time in her bed. She sinks into the mattress, sheets tangled around her. She stares at the ceiling, twirls her hair between her fingertips. She mutters to herself. Sometimes the prison responds, sometimes it just watches. </p><p>She wonders why she had to end up here. She wonders if she could have done something differently, changed something, talked with different people, walked down a different street. But she didn’t. So, she lays down in the bed in her cell and memorizes the ceiling. </p><p>By the third month, Draco barely leaves her cell. When the smell of herself gets to be overwhelming, she heads down to the showers. Then, she comes back, lays down, and does nothing. The prison grows bored with her and she wonders if there are other people in the prison who remember how to see the world as it really is, with singing suns and talkative buildings. She wonders if they gossip with the prison at night. She almost wishes she did, but then she sinks back into the familiar blankness. She considers asking the prison for directions to the exit, free of the ever-present guards. </p><p>Draco dismisses the idea soon enough, remembering all too well how it felt to break into a nervous sweat every time a police officer walked by and to glance nervously over her shoulder whenever someone asked her name. She would rather walk the streets free as a bird, able to glare at the cops with all her might and leave them with the realization that there was nothing they could do about it.</p><p>The eighth month, there is an escape.</p><p>Draco whispers to the prison as the guards walk by, checking each cell’s occupant with hard eyes. The alarms blare in the background. </p><p>“What’s going on?”</p><p>The prison, voice pitched low, says, “Let me tell you about DeAndre Stevens.” Draco presses her ear close to the wall and listens.</p><p>In the morning, she gets up for the first time in days and does push-ups on the floor. By number five, her breath is shaky and sweat already coats her underarms. She lays her forehead against the cool cement and tells herself that she will not become that creature again, who breathed and slept and did nothing else.</p><p>The prison whispers encouragement to her. It tells her the words of a man in the cell below her. He likes to read things aloud, and the prison relays entire novels to her. She listens as she sits in her cell, trapped. Her hour a day becomes a sacred time. She goes out to the exercise yard and chats up a storm with anyone willing to talk. She acts as if sport is not an absolute bore and she would love to do nothing more than listen to an in-depth, day by day recounting of the events in the life of an inmate’s two-year-old daughter. She tolerates it because she likes to see the way their faces light up with excitement, their gestures getting grander and their voices getting louder. She likes to see the passion and vigor in the eyes of someone who is well and truly alive—or as alive as anyone could ever get in a place like this. She misses that feeling. She wonders if she will ever get it back.</p><p>The tenth month passes, then the ninth. Draco idly asks if anyone’s noticed that usually April comes after March and not before, so isn’t this year a little odd? They say they frankly hadn’t noticed before and maybe she’s onto something. The next day, they forget the conversation even occurred and she gives up.</p><p>The eleventh and the twelfth pass in the correct order. She’s a little disappointed, wonders if she might get off a month early if they went the wrong way around again.</p><p>Two days before Draco’s scheduled release, Draco is pacing. She murmurs to herself, wondering how it will feel to be able to walk down a road without anyone telling her where she can go and what she can do. She laughs to herself, pictures all the crazy outfits she’s firmly decided she’s getting (hippie flowing white dresses, punk rock mini skirts and leather jackets, flannels and sweatpants and footie pajamas because she can wear anything she damn well wants to!). Orange, however, is going to be permanently excised from her wardrobe.</p><p>*</p><p>On the first day free of prison, Draco gets a tattoo. Getting a tattoo is an exhausting experience. Which didn’t stop Draco from delightedly peering down at her bandaged arm every five seconds, but did make her question where she was planning on sleeping. She may still have some money squirreled away in her bank account, but it certainly wasn't enough that she wanted to waste it on a hotel room for a night. She sighed and considered the alley. The buildings on either side seem friendly enough, content to ignore the world around them, which certainly says good things about Draco’s quality of sleep there. She still held a grudge against the prison for waking her at three o’clock in the morning. Buildings, as it turns out, are clueless when it comes to concepts like exhaustion and having a rather insistent circadian rhythm. Buildings are clueless about a lot of things. </p><p>London, though. London understood exhaustion. Draco could feel the city aching with lack of sleep and a bone-deep desire to rest. Draco went to New York City once, when she was fourteen for a vacation with her parents. She still remembers the restless energy, the feeling that she could walk out of the rented apartment and have endless adventures where she never grows bored or tired—perpetual child-like excitement. Draco used to dream of moving there, when she still looked up at the stars and shivered in delight, imagining epic escapades with the archer Orion and what it would be like to play fetch with Canis Minor. Draco is not that person anymore. </p><p>The alley is dark and quiet, but safe for the moment. The dumpster provides a nice shield against the elements, so Draco slides in between the brick wall and the back of the dumpster. She pulls the hood of her windbreaker over her head and huddles into the dry asphalt. The alley cat scoffs at her and climbs onto the fire escape for a more dignified rest. Draco raises the expected fingers and falls into a fitful sleep. </p><p>When Draco wakes, Dawn is still creeping over the horizon. She sends Dawn a judgmental look. Dawn rolls his eyes at her and continues stealthily climbing. </p><p>Draco rises, shoving her hands in her pockets. She keeps her head down, and turns the corner into a nicer part of town. The smell of sugar wafts down the street from the bakery Draco walks by. She makes sure to keep her head down, refusing to look inside at the sweet treats she knows she will not be able to refuse if she glimpses them through the window.</p><p>She keeps an eye on each pair of shoes that walks by. Occasionally, for the more eccentric, she glances up at the face and torso, but mostly the legs and feet are satisfactory. Out of style stockings, heels three inches too high to allow a quick getaway if need be, the practical loafers of a bachelor, and the paint and dirt-smeared boots of a construction worker. A myriad of lives.</p><p>The first order of business, Draco decides, is to find a place to sleep. She scopes out the park first. There are a few serviceable benches in sight, so she internally marks the place down as having potential and moves on to the residential district. She wanders the streets, looking for RENT ME signs. Though, in all honesty, it’s just a way to occupy time. </p><p>That night, she lies down on the bench and looks up at the sky. Betelgeuse blinks down at her. For half a second, Draco thinks she is looking at the ceiling of her cell. The moment fades.</p>
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